The Melodramatic Realism of Luchino Visconti

The Melodramatic Realism of Luchino Visconti David Gariff Notes to accompany the film series Luchino Visconti at the National Gallery of Art (front cover) La terra trema November 3 through December 16, 2018 (above) Morte a Venezia (back cover) Senso Courtesy Photofest nga.gov/film 1 The Melodramatic Realism of Luchino Visconti I like melodrama because it is situated just at the In 1948 the Italian film director Luchino Visconti meeting point between life and theater. (1906 – 1976) made La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), the story of the rituals and hardships of life in the small Sicilian fish- — Luchino Visconti ing village Aci Trezza, near Catania. Based on the nineteenth- century verismo novel I malavoglia by Giovanni Verga (1840 – 1922), La terra trema is, in part, Visconti’s response to films by French directors like Jean Renoir (1894 – 1979) and René Clair (1898 – 1981). More importantly, the film is a vibrant example of the tenets of neorealism advocated in Visconti’s 1941 article “Truth and Poetry: Verga and the Italian Cinema,” which was published in the Italian avant-garde journal Cinema. The article calls for Italian filmmakers to return to the rich tradition of Italian realist literature that extends back into the nineteenth century, specifically the novels and stories of Verga. Visconti praises Verga’s stark, impersonal, and often fatalistic portray- als of human experience, as well as his sensitivity to regional dialects and customs, as inspiration for a relevant cinema that would confront the problems of modern Italy in the 1940s. With the fall of Fascism in 1943, Italian filmmakers embraced a new freedom that encouraged this direct and authentic style of movie making. Beginning with the films of Roberto Rossellini (1906 – 1977) and continuing in the work of Vittorio De Sica (1902 – 1974) and the early films of Visconti, neorealism sought a more democratic spirit, telling stories of ordinary people with little or no moralizing. The settings are the streets and buildings of real cities, many of which still bore the scars of war when they were filmed. The performers are often nonprofessional actors, including those cast in major roles. If the films have a “style,” it might loosely be termed documentary (or realistic), eschewing subjective camera work and editing as well as romantic effects of lighting. Of particular importance to their production was allowing scenes to play out in real time, however slowly or 2 David Gariff 3 The Melodramatic Realism of Luchino Visconti methodically. Dialogue is composed of everyday conversations Cinema, especially films about history, expresses itself through of people on the street, even when the scripts are inspired by human emotion. We transport ourselves back in time to experi- a literary text. Indeed, those literary texts themselves are often ence events as if we had been there, while at the same time we written in a vernacular style stressing common speech patterns derive modern meaning from the historical events depicted. and regional dialects. (La terra trema, which features the Sicilian For filmmakers such as Blasetti, Rossellini, and Visconti, dialect spoken in Aci Trezza, played in the rest of Italy, and even Italian history (especially modern history) was a never-ending in other parts of Sicily, with Italian subtitles.) debate about fundamental problems that still exist today: class This period in Italian film history — from roughly 1943, with struggle; regionalism (especially the divide between north and Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession) and Rossellini’s Roma, città south); the role of the Catholic Church in Italian life; and the basic aperta (Rome, Open City), to 1952 and De Sica’s Umberto D — responsibilities and obligations of the individual and the state. is a golden age in the history of Italian cinema. The neorealist The difference between Gone with the Wind and Il gattopardo films produced during this period are among the greatest in is, in part, Visconti’s pointed commentary (visually translated world cinema and include Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Germania through the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and person- anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947), the final two chapters in ally expressed through the character of Don Fabrizio) that “things Rossellini’s War Trilogy; Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Ladri di have to change in order to remain the same.” The struggles of biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) by De Sica; and La terra trema Don Fabrizio and his family mirror the threatening political, cul- by Visconti. Italian films of this time also confront the history of tural, and social climate of the time. It is important to remember Italy’s nineteenth-century struggle for national unity and inde- that Visconti himself was both an aristocrat (descended from the pendence from foreign domination known as the Risorgimento. noble Visconti family of Milan) and a Marxist. 1860 (1933), directed by Alessandro Blasetti (1900 – 1987); Viva Situated halfway through Visconti’s filmography, which l’Italia (1960), by Rossellini; and Senso (1954) and Il gattopardo spans the years 1943 to 1976, is Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco (1963) — sometimes referred to as the Italian Gone with the and His Brothers, 1960). In this work Visconti’s abiding neoreal- Wind — by Visconti are among the most prominent examples ism melds with a melodramatic story worthy of the verismo of this phenomenon. operas of Puccini, Leoncavallo, and Mascagni, which them- Visconti is arguably the Italian neorealist director most selves return us to the stories of Verga. Exploring the ongoing influenced by the thought of two twentieth-century Italian issue of the mezzogiorno, the term used to describe the his- writer-philosophers whose ideas directly shaped modern tory of economic and social inequality between northern and attitudes toward Italian history and film: Benedetto Croce southern Italy, the film follows members of the Parondi family (1866 – 1952) and Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937). Both men (a mother and her four sons) who arrive in Milan from Lucania emphasized the inextricable links between art, history, and the (Basilicata), a mountainous region in southern Italy. art of history (as opposed to the science of history). For Croce Even into the 1960s Basilicata remained one of Italy’s most and Gramsci knowledge derives from intuition and emotion. impoverished regions. Many individuals and families were forced 4 David Gariff 5 The Melodramatic Realism of Luchino Visconti to migrate north in search of work. Over the course of Rocco e i The allure of Venice for nineteenth-century British, Ameri- suoi fratelli, each brother charts a different course representing can, German, and French painters is well known. But the list aspects of the migration experience within Italy. These events of “northern lights” attracted to Venice also includes Lord and experiences are rooted in Visconti’s (and Gramsci’s) views Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, Robert of the feudal life of the south, the racism against southern Italian Browning, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Richard Wagner, peasants by northern workers, the importance of family, and Marcel Proust, Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich the realization that, despite the prejudice, injustices, and hard- Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ezra Pound, to name only a ships faced in Milan, returning to the south is not an option. All few. All saw Venice as a city with a dual nature, stressing such things change, but a regeneration of the economic, social, and contrasts as beauty and vacancy; voluptuousness and weari- moral order can only be achieved through the creation of new ness; radiance and fatality; ecstasy and dissolution; health and structures in society (especially an alliance between northern disease. For all these individuals Venice was the nexus between workers and southern peasants) and faith in the future. Rocco north and south, east and west; it was a unique confluence of e i suoi fratelli is in some ways the fullest and most complicated all desire. exploration of Visconti’s realist vision coupled with his dramatic, At the heart of Venice’s distinct geography, history, culture, even operatic, examination of good and evil. and psychology lies the archetype of the labyrinth. In his Italian If Rocco e i suoi fratelli explores the tension between social Journey (1786 – 1788), the German poet Goethe wrote, “I have progress and a nostalgia for the past, Visconti’s Morte a Venezia often sighed longingly for solitude, and now I can really enjoy (Death in Venice) is among the director’s most personal explora- it. Perhaps there is only one person in Venice that knows me, tions of love, desire, and the tension between beauty and intellect. and we shall not soon meet. Toward evening, again without a Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella and the Visconti film based on it are guide, I lost my way . I tried to find my way out of this labyrinth studies in the fatal charm that has long been associated with La without asking anyone . but it is an incredible maze.”1 In Vis- Serenissima. Few films in the history of modern cinema so well conti’s Death in Venice, Tadzio’s mother (portrayed by Silvana capture Venice’s threatening presence as the seductress of the Mangano) confidently leads her family through this diseased northern European visitor, labyrinth, and locus for liebestod (love- labyrinth, which enables the seduction and destruction of death). Visconti took many liberties with the original Mann novella Aschenbach. Unlike men, women, it seems, instinctively know in his adapted screenplay. Among the most important was chang- how to negotiate this confusing maze. ing the character of Aschenbach from a writer to a composer, Visconti also captures the tragedy of Venice as the locus thereby strengthening the ties to the figure of Gustav Mahler for liebestod or love-death. Both Nietzsche and Wagner had (1860 – 1911).

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